Today, 26th November, 2014, something unusual has happened. The national news of the day includes quite a lot of coverage of the abject failure of the health and social care system, and the government, to do what it was supposed to do in the aftermath of the Winterbourne View scandal in which the BBC Panorama programme showed abuse being meted out to some of the most vulnerable people in our land, young adults who are intellectually disabled (or in the UK’s idiosyncratic parlance, “learning disabled”).

There are great similarities between the abuse recently uncovered and that found in NHSfacilities in Cornwall and Merton and Sutton a few years ago. Action was taken then thatresulted in significant local and national progress. The learning from that appears to havebeen forgotten, certainly by CQC and many local commissioners – in part we believebecause of the continual reorganisation of public services.

At the time that was written I was the Head of the Manchester Learning Disability Partnership. I retired 8 months later and since then the government’s austerity policies – cuts – have decimated what was once a leading edge, innovative, and broadly person-centred – if inevitably imperfect – system of supports for people to live at home. That is to say the cuts did it, together with ruthless and insensitive management imposed from a very senior level (I commented on the decline in the malign turn in organisational manners under austerity here).